Gantt Chart View Corruption on a PWA Published Schedule in Microsoft Project Pro

I came across another issue with a client’s Project Server recently that was isolated to one specific project that was published on the client’s PWA environment. This client’s environment uses Project Server (PWA) 2010 and Project Pro 2010.

A project schedule that was already published into PWA was opened by the PM from Project Pro. Now normally when a project is opened, the default view is the Gantt Chart view. Somewhere along the line, this project schedule became corrupted and would no longer show the Gantt Chart view. What was even more odd was that all the other views (both out-of-box and custom views) seemed to work and display properly. As you can see in the screen shot below, when selecting the Gantt Chart view it would not load, but show a portion of the screen that was viewed last. In this case I was looking in the File Tab and tried to go back to the Gantt Chart view.

What we found was that the Gantt Chart view became cross-referenced with another view during one of the Save/Publishing sessions. To find this, we had to 1) Go into the File tab, 2) Open the Manage Global Templates dropdown, and 3) Look in the Global Template Organizer.

Once the Global Template Organizer was displayed and confirmed we were in the Views tab, it showed that the Gantt Chart view was cross-referenced with the Task Details Form view. This was preventing the Gantt Chart view from opening because Project Pro didn’t know where to look for the appropriate table.

The way we corrected this was to go back to the project schedule and select the Task Details Form view for display.

What this did was to free up the Gantt Chart view in the organizer so we could replace the corrupted view with the Global Gantt Chart view. Navigating back to the Global Template Organizer, we then deleted the Gantt Chart view that did not show a cross-reference. Once the non-referenced Gantt Chart was deleted, I was then able to select the Gantt Chart in the Global (+non-cached Enterprise) on the left side and Copy to the opened project schedule on the right side of the Organizer dialogue box and click the Copy button.

I was then prompted to replace or rename the view. Of course, we wanted to replace that corrupted view… So we clicked the Yes button.

Now that the corrupted Gantt Chart view was replaced with the out-of-the-box view, we were now able to see the default Gantt Chart view.

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